Author: literatitrash

After getting asked a couple times this week for my advice to early career writers, I decided to throw everything I didn’t learn from my BA in creative writing into one handy reference. Many of these lessons have to do with emotional resilience, self discipline, and self care. Some of this advice is more pertinent to career writers than hobby or intermittent writers, so feel free to select what is helpful to you. And it’s okay if you’re in one category one day and another the next; identity is nebulous.

Talent is only 30% responsible for success. During my time in my program, I saw incandescently talented writers languish in obscurity because they didn’t make the time to work on their writing, or because they didn’t think they were “good enough” to submit their work for publication (we call this self-rejection, which is another name for the devil). Other writers, objectively less talented and less experienced, ended up getting the grades and the acceptances because they wrote and submitted relentlessly. By my senior year, a colleague who I had written off as mediocre had won the departmental fiction award and had been published in a literary magazine with an acceptance rate lower than Harvard. That sobered me up real quick.

There’s nothing you can’t fix in post-production. Okay, there are some things you can’t fix in revision, and some projects do require you to rip out the seams and start again from an entirely new pattern, but that’s rare. Your first draft should be you putting color on the canvas, or chipping a rough form out of marble. I used to be a habitual edit-as-I-went type and it became crippling. I could never finish a first draft, and would spend ages re-writing the first 17 pages. Don’t be me. Lean into the discomfort of not-perfect and keep pushing through.

Don’t spend eons working on the same project. At least not without working on other things too. True, some writers spend ten years agonizing over their debut novel which is published to much acclaim, but they are outliers. Allow yourself to try new forms, tell new stories, to play and grow. This will build up your portfolio and give you more things to submit while you chip away at that magnum opus. It will also making getting said magnum opus published 500% easier since you won’t have emerged from the vapor, unheard of and unproven.

Listen to criticism, but don’t write by committee. In order to graduate from my program, we had to write 50 pages of a novel and commit to working them over with twenty people weighing in on our progress every week. It was incredibly easy to become a slave to other people’s advice (which would inevitably conflict) and lose yourself rushing to appease every opinion. We refer to this phenomenon as “writing by committee”. Know who your trusted critique partners are and be vulnerable to them, but don’t invite everyone in. You can’t be all things to all people.

In order for some to love your work, others have to hate it. Not everyone is going to love what you have to bring to the table (ex: I recognize Brandon Sanderson is an excellent writer and I adore listening to him talk writing, but I don’t enjoy his books) but having people divided on your stories is far preferable to having everyone shrug and say “they’re alright I guess”. Nothing to write home about”. A few bad reviews are always worth making the statement, taking the artistic risk, or being honest to the story you want to tell. An exception to this rule is being belligerently dismissive of other people’s constructive critique, especially if that critique sounds a little like “you’re being an ass”.

Routine is God’s gift to writers. If you want this life to pay you like a job, you have to treat it like a job. That means carving our regular time in your schedule to write, setting project goals with deadlines, and seeking out critique partners and beta readers who will support your journey and keep you accountable. For the last few years, I drifted from project to project, only submitting when I felt like it, and I had not been published for years. In October of 2017 I made myself a promise to start treating my writing like the career I always wanted it to be. I set daily word goals, wrote down submission dates on my calendar, researched marketing and self publishing, and spruced up my social media. It is now September of 2018 and I have self-published my first novella and had a short story published in a traditional anthology. Attitude makes a world of difference.

Read where you submit, and then read their guidelines twice. I’m sure you’ve heard this one but it bears repeating. Take the time to get a real feel for the magazine or publisher you’re swinging for, then tailor your cover letter/query letter to their tone and specs.

We’re literally all faking it. Neil Gaiman? Lied about his experience to get his first publication. F. Scott Fitzgerald? An absolute disaster who couldn’t spell. Donna Tartt? Committed to her authorial brand before anyone knew her name. The only thing that makes someone a writer is their decision to do the work and call themselves a writer. You do that long enough, and soon other people start calling you a writer too. When I first started posting my writing on Tumblr way back in ye olde 2012, I posted my poems in quotations with my pen-name at the bottom like a ~real~ author That created the social proof I needed for people to search for my name, ask my questions about my work, and encourage me to keep going.

Imposter syndrome does not go away when you get a byline. If not being published is eating up at you, so will not being published in the “right” magazines, or not getting a high enough advance, or not being invited to conventions, or not selling enough copies of your first print run. The earlier in your career you can get a handle on that little demon called Not-A-Real-Writer that lives in your chest, the better.

You will need to rest. This is a tough lesson for us go-go-types, but you can’t pour from an empty cup, and you can’t create when you’re burnt out, poorly fed, badly rested, or stressed to the max. There are seasons for pushing through the exhaustion to the accomplishment on the other side, but this can’t be your normal. Don’t forget to check in with your body for captured tension (in grinding teeth, tight shoulders, shallow breaths) and please nourish your flesh vessel with brisks walks, cold water, long baths, snooze buttons, and comforting fresh-from-the-oven goodies.

We’re out here together hustling and trying to pull words together into stories worth sharing, so no matter where you are in your writing career, I believe in you!

What are some lessons about writing you wish someone had shared with you sooner? Leave them in the comments section below; I’m curious to know!

Growing up as a girl in a conservative religious community is challenging, especially when you’re the bastard child of a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher and a Catholic waitress. Considered unclean by the congregation and her grandfather, the fearsome Reverend, because of her affinity for the church’s’ venomous snakes, eight-year-old Callie Ann spends most of her time feeding crickets and mice to her only friends.

But as the Reverend’s sinister hold on his rapt flock grows, so does Callie’s connection to her dead mother, and a dark prophecy begins to take shape.

What People Are Saying

“Revival finds that old time religion venomously snaking its way back, to the peril of those who would dare to dance with vipers and tempt Fate itself.”

“Gibson’s Revival was like THE BAD SEED set to a religious hymn (that’s a good thing)”

Gothic genres are squarely situated in their geographic locations, so the best way to get a feel for a Gothic genre is to get a feel for the land. If taking a trip to the bayou or Piedmont is prohibitive, read the greats. I recommend Flannery O’Connor’s entire body of work, the Anne Rice novels set in New Orleans, and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”. You can also check out My Blood on the Scrarecrow Southen Gothic inspo tag.

Photo courtesy of Rodney Harvey

As far as craft advice goes, avoid dialect. Dialect is phonetically rendering words the way they may sound in an accent (nuthin’, wassat, sho’nuf) and it tends to be distracting to the reader and insulting to the speakers of the accent you are invoking. You can invoke an accent through word choice and placement instead (see my use of vernacular terms like “best believe” in the prompts below) and the best way to learn these turns-of-phrase is to listen to native speakers

Similarly, steer clear of tropes that have now crossed the threshold into hurtful stereotype such as the ignorant redneck, “magical negro”, Jezebel, mammy, or in-bred mountain family, unless you have a very good reason. Odds are, unless its intelligent subversion, your reason is not good enough.

Still from AMC’s Preacher.

I still feel like my Southern Gothic writing is bit of a caricature in many ways, because the first breath I took wasn’t muggy and magnolia-sweet, but after a decade of my formative years spent in the mountains of western North Carolina, I’ve got an inkling. Here are some jumping off points for you:

If you don’t leave this town by nineteen years old, you won’t leave at all. If you try, you’ll find all roads lead back to your now-abandoned high school.

You can do all the brutalizing, cheating, and bloodletting you want inside this house, but God help you if the neighbors hear about it.

The forest takes a couple of human sacrifices a year, lost hikers or fresh graduates who had a little bit too much to drink at the homecoming party. It’s simply the way of things.

The cicadas do the screaming for every neglected child, battered wife, and dispossessed son who can’t shout for themselves.

Everyone sees the sinful things their neighbors drag across their backyards in the middle of the night. They just have the good sense not to go around letting on that they know about it.

Heredity is horrifying. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things you can inherit.

You’d better not break the heart of the wrong local girl, because there’s a good chance she’s got a granny witch living up in one of the hollers who’ll stick your name in a mason jar with some piss and pins and make your life a living hell.

If you cut the magnolia trees, they’ll bleed red as you or me.

It’s not a matter of if the preacher man has seen the devil, it’s a question of whether or not he greeted him as an old friend.

When you finally meet Jesus, you best believe he’s going to be carrying a list of crimes for you to answer for.

I’ve known for some time that my book acquisition habits needed an intervention. What can I say? I’m spoiled and decadent in my bookish ways; I live near one of the coolest used bookstores in the country, I spend my workdays at an audiobook publisher finding new authors (and adding their books to my TBR), and I also get free paperbacks and audiobooks as part of my job. I’m so book-wealthy my house is beginning to look like a Versailles of fantasy ARCs, paperbacks I slipped into my purse on my way home from the office, and buzzed-about debuts delivered straight to my door courtesy of prime shipping.

It’s gotten…a little out of hand.

Take it from someone who spent last night building yet another bookshelf to house her thrift store scores and Barnes and Noble impulse buys; it’s possible to lose some real gems in the book avalanche.

Don’t mind me I’ll be here…digging myself out with a shovel.

That’s why I’ve decided to institute a no-new-books ban through the rest of 2018. That’s right; I’m going to abstain from buying or renting any new books through the rest of the year! I was inspired partly by the September #readwhatyouown challenge started by instagrammer ANovelFamily. So without futher ado, here are my top reasons to join me on this book-buying cleanse!

It reassigns your money value. Those books tossed on your bedside table or shoved into your backpack had enough value at one time that you were willing to pay good money for them! Honor you past self by getting your money’s worth out of those pricey little acquisitions.

It helps you de-clutter your home. Could you imagine how much more room you would have in your living space if you got rid of books you read and had no intention of reading again? I know it can be difficult to let go of books, but be judicious about which ones you keep after reading them during the challenge!

It resets your attention span. I know as I’ve gotten older and more absorbed into social media and multitasking culture, its gotten more difficult for me to be still and devote myself to a single story. When I can’t hop from free audiobook to free audiobook with my mood, I’m much more likely to commit to that sweet sweet book monogamy. Lately, I’ve been tucking into Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, a book a bought myself as a payday present last month, and Her Perfect Match by Jess Michaels, a steamy historical romance I snagged from the free shelf at work. I’m further along in them than I ever would have been before #readwhatyouown.

It helps you feel better about what you choose to read. A fatigue of choices can happen when you have unlimited stories at you fingertips through online shopping (multiply this by 100 if you have a E-reader or Audible subscription). It can make whatever you choose feel disappointing, or distract you from enjoying that book you really wanted because there’s a new release to lust after. Picking what to read from what you already own helps with satiety and satisfaction.

A #ReadWhatYouOwn Protip: Know when you need to bend the rules! Really wanting that hot YA debut is not a good enough reason to cheat on your challenge, but if you promised to beta a friend’s novel, or if you have to buy new books for your fall classes, work those into your reading plan ahead of time! I’m currently writing my next novella, a retelling of the Snow Queen story, and I know I’m going to have acquire and re-read the Hans Christen Anderson original as well as snag some library books on Scandanavian folklore and history for research.

Feeling inspired? Who’s going to go on this #ReadWhatYouOwn journey with me?

“Odd Spirits is the literary equivalent to dark chocolate. Once I got a taste, I could not put it down. The writing style is absolutely gorgeous, and the story itself is immediately captivating. It was sweet and romantic one moment and brutally honest the next; plus, the paranormal elements made every chapter dark and mysterious in all the right ways.”

If you aren’t already following Katie, get on that! She blog about books, travel, politics, and the intersection of all three topics.

Note: I received an advance reader copy of Odd Spirits from the author in exchange for a book review.

It takes a lot of commitment to make a marriage between a ceremonial magician and a chaos witch work, but when a malevolent entity takes up residence in Rhys and Moira’s home, their love will be pushed to the limits.

Brewing up a solution is easier said than done when your magical styles are polar opposites; throw a psychic ex and a secret society in the mix, and things are bound to get messy.

Fans of The Raven Cycle and The Haunting of Hill House will devour this paranormal romance with a diverse cast of characters!

Like so many other writers I admire, I discovered Sarah Taylor Gibson through social media. When she announced that her novella Odd Spirits would be released this month, I could hardly contain my excitement.

Welcome to publication day! Odd Spirits is now available for digital purchase in the Amazon kindle store and (if you don’t feel like giving Jeff Bezos 30% of your purchase) on Smashwords for only $2.99! That’s less than your morning latte!

It takes a lot of commitment to make a marriage between a modern ceremonial magician and a chaos witch work, but when a malevolent entity takes up residence in Rhys and Moira’s home, their love will be pushed to the limits. Brewing up a solution is easier said than done when your magical styles are polar opposites; throw a psychic ex and a secret society in the mix, and things are bound to get messy.

This diverse paranormal romance novella is perfect for fans of The Raven Cycle and The Haunting of Hill House.

Can I read the digital copy without an e-reader? Absolutely! You can read it on your phone, laptop, or tablet for free without any special software

I only read print books. Will there be a paperback edition? Yes! As soon as Amazon approves my submission we will be in the paperback business. I will also be selling print copies direct from me if you prefer to bypass Amazon and get a free autograph out of the deal.

I pre-ordered a book and my order was cancelled? Sorry to hear that! Due to technichal difficulties, Amazon cancelled and refunded many pre-orders. DM and I’ll get you hooked up with your copy!

I’m strapped for cash right now; is there any other way I can support you? Reblogging this post is a great help to me! Also, if you’ve received a copy of the book, reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are a blessing to me.

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Welcome!

Saint is a poet, author, and village wise woman in training. By day she works for an audiobook publisher, and by night she scribbles stories full of big personalities, lavish settings, and the sort of existential questions that are considered impolite to discuss at dinner.